I'd just like to say that I never make meta posts like this one, but for some reason this topic has really struck a chord with me on this Wednesday evening...

We recently lost a user from Tildes. I don't know which day, but I'd already noticed they weren't around a few days before I did some digging into it. The names here are not important. But this user had been a prolific poster over the last six months. As someone on Tildes who does a lot of tagging, they were high up on my 'user interaction list' in the passive way that comes from amending tags can do.

Some departing users leave all of their contributions behind, along with their username, never to be seen from again. Perhaps they regenerate with a new handle or perhaps they find pastures fresh elsewhere. Some users take all of their topics with them, along with the conversations, the ideas, the thoughts, and in my mind a little piece of the Tildes community. The latter is what happened here with our prolific user.

This has made me unusually sad. There are lots of users I miss on a personal connection level, whether that be the status they held in the community, or simply missing the elegance of their prose. Sometimes they return and I smile at my keyboard. Sometimes I check how they're doing by looking on Reddit. The sadness here comes from a feeling that when a prolific user leaves with their topics, it feels like a library user leaving the country with their borrowed library books. I've never been very good with analogies.

People talk about link rot and video game preservation and the walled gardens of the internet and it feels like this mourning over lost information from a link aggregator with a close-knit community bound up in it fits in there somewhere in the discourse.

In a comment to this topic I'm going to link to as many of the lost topics as I was able to find. These will be direct links to the articles, not to the Tildes discussion. I don't want this act to feel like grave-robbing by linking to deleted Tildes pages.

This is the end of my hopefully only foray into meta posting. I don't think I have the wordsmith-ery for it.

No, really. Sincerely putting this out there.

Using Tildes sometimes feels like talking into the void. The UI, even in Three Cheers, is minimal. The conversations sometimes clinical, though I greatly appreciate the compassion that comes through here versus other places that shall remain nameless.

Yet I am struck. I've seen people here, more recently, cite meeting other Tildans (Tildaniens? Tilwhoseits?).

As a somewhat reclusive 51 year-old married dude with only furry children, I don't get it. But I do know that I need more friendships. It gets harder, as you get older. (As for me, not keeping toxic friendships from school and later 2 decades working remotely led to, well, this.)

So how do you connect with humans as humans here? How do you "make friends"?

Asking as someone who has a diagnosed potent ADHD and perhaps other as yet medically undetermined NDisms.

(No idea what tags to use for this. Help?)

The recent history of social media has made me interested in the factors that make online communities successful/healthy, or toxic etc.. This is one of the appeals of Tildes for me. I'm also emotionally invested in seeing a healthy future for the Irish language, which has seen some interesting developments in the internet age but remains in a precarious position as a community language in the country. You can see how these two interests dovetail together. At the moment this is a thought experiment, but later, who knows...

Tips I've got so far:

I've heard that some barriers to entry can increase group loyalty by making members feels slightly "invested" by earning a place in the community

I've also noted that some of the most persistant subcultures operate online but also have a strong in-person element (eg: furries)

There's also the common observation that good moderation is crucial to user experience and therefore group cohesion

Then I got some pointers from the Tildes docs:

• Trust by default, punish abusers
• Focus on user experience, not growth metrics
• Favour deep engagement over shallow/clickbait
• Empower members to make choices
• The golden rule (apply charitable interpretations, don't tolerate bad actors)

So, people of Tildes: what factors do you see as crucial to building and maintaining a strong cohesive online community?

Hi. I'm finishing my schooling and have received a job offer on the west coast (Vancouver). I also have comparably good, though marginally worse, job offers here on the east coast where I live (Toronto).

I'm familiar with Toronto and have many friends here or nearby, especially since I grew up and went to school not too far. However, the offer I have in Vancouver is "better" both in terms of compensation (though not that it makes a big difference) and in terms of the actual learning experience I would have on the job.

If this job was also in Toronto I would take it immediately with no hesitation. However, it being in Vancouver gives me some pause. I've visited the city and have some mutual, but not personal, friends there. The city overall is fairly agreeable, and I enjoy the nature and scenery a lot.

Question: have any of you made similar moves, how did you feel about it retrospectively, and how did you go about establishing a friend group outside of work?

Cohost.org, an independent social media blogging platform, will be shutting down as early as next month. A lot of users are talking about how their time on Cohost changed the way they think about what an experience in an online community can be like in the modern age of the internet. People saying that they'd rather move forward with spending more time offline and with their hobbies than chasing the next social media site after Cohost's closure. I tend to agree.

After checking an old forum recently that I used to frequent in the heyday of internet forums, I found it filled with racist fear-mongering that is left unmoderated after the driving force of the community passed away half a decade ago. I wonder how much of the spirit of the old web we can realistically rekindle. If you're on Tildes, you probably know everything about the faults of giant social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. Heck, the poor quality the YouTube comments section was a meme when YouTube was new. It was never good on those sites. Just tolerable and everybody was there so you kind of had no choice. Now, many of those platforms are self-imploding.

Cohost, like Tildes, created an atmosphere where you didn't feel like you were committing a moral wrongdoing by not immediately spewing scalding hot takes about current events, drama and conflicts. You were encouraged to write text that wasn't throwaway garbage. You could have meaningful conversations about issues and find an audience. Cohost was not without its flaws. People of colour in particular recently shared experiences of racist harassment on the site that was purely handled by moderation. But overall the takes I'm reading now is that most people will be able to look back on their time on Cohost fondly. I've seen people calling it "the Dreamcast of websites".

Cohost was a social media site that was a joy to visit for me and didn't put me on an edge by interacting with it. I could write posts, long-form posts without pressure to hit out another one-line zinger while a topic "is still relevant". I didn't see endless chains of subtweets that deliberately avoided explicitly mentioning the drama they were commenting on, lest the hate mob find their comment. I didn't get into that kind of unnerving cycle of "I don't know what this post is about, but the infrastructure of this social network suggests it's a moral failure to not chime in on the topic de jour, so I better get going and scan vile tweets for an hour to find out what's going on".

And before you say that this is only a Twitter problem, I have had pretty much exactly the same experiences on Mastodon and especially Bluesky. I feel the same in over-crowded Discord servers where it's very difficult to keep track of what's been talked about and what the current topic of discussion is. I feel the same on the few active forums that still exist, like resetera, where there's just posts upon posts that you're kind of expected to read before you chime in into a thread.

So where to go from here? I'm thinking about setting up my own proper blog, maybe hosted on an own website. That way I can continue to create long form posts about topics I want to. And bring back a little more of the spirit of the old internet. Cohost is dead, but there's no going back to me to doomscrolling. Today I set my phone to aggressively limit my daily usage of Reddit & Mastodon. I said the following when Twitter crashed and burned, but this time I'm not desperate, but genuine when I say: It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Do we have any information on how Tildes growth is going?

I only use Tildes, used to only use reddit until they pulled their bullshit last year. I don't use any social media and I feel like I am missing out on a lot of news and things. When I used reddit I had curated my subs to my interests and I feel like I was up to date on everything I wanted to be.

But now, due to Tildes being a much smaller community, the news I receive is much more generalized and I've been noticing a lot of times I miss things. For example because all video games are clumped together in one Games Tildes, only the most popular kinds of gaming news gets posted there, so more specific or niche things I miss.

Another example, I had never heard of Ozempic before the South Park episode, and a friend was shocked and told me I was so out of the loop for not knowing what it was. I'd never seen anyone talk about it on here, so how would I know?

I also notice there's just significantly less engagement overall on Tildes. I can scroll through the front page of Tildes every morning, see maybe half posts I've already seen and half new ones, and by the end of the day there will be a handful of new posts but not many. In its golden years, Reddit would have new posts every few hours with new info or news about different things. Tildes feels really small still.

Point being, I'm curious how Tildes is doing in terms of growth and whether it looks like it'll be getting larger communities which will split more subcategories into the broad categories we have now. Or if it has plateaued and this is how it'll be for good?

Hi everyone,

As other Tildes members have expressed through multiple topics, finding friends as adult is hard. I'm currently trying to figure what's the best way to do this for me and I was hoping I could get some help. I've tried joining group activities like boardgame and table top RPG groups but while it's been good to make acquaintances I haven't been able to find someone I could call a friend. I know partly this is on me because it's hard for me to connect with others, but through repetition I'm hoping to get there eventually. I also thought recently maybe I should change or complement my approach with something else, which is why I'm here. Are there any good online platforms to make friends? I know that for the most part apps where the goal is to get people together are more geared towards romantic relationships, but that's not what I'm after, I'm looking for something strickly platonic. Ideally should be someone near me so that we're not restricted to only doing online activities.

Appreciate any help I can get here.